On the public record

Dr. Moser’s talk yesterday was remarkable, for her direct, realistic and authoritative claims about how to change people’s behavior on climate change. If you are interested in that stuff, her powerpoint presentation is clear and gives links to the research behind her talk.

At the end of her talk, someone in the audience raised the issue of population pressures. I’ve now seen this happen a few times. A scientist presents his or her research to the convention and at the end, someone in the audience brings up the elephant in the room. Everyone gets quiet and intent, because it is obviously crucial and no one official can bring it up. I’ve seen a panel sit silent until one guy took the mike and openly laughed at the prospect of answering that question. When there is an answer, it is usually about brown people in a different country and the solution is to educate the ladies. This is nice because obviously we should be on that path anyway and it will coincidentally solve population problems somewhere else. The other not-very-responsive answer is to mention overconsumption and say that we should have kids but ride our bikes too!

Dr. Moser yesterday acknowledged that the topic is taboo, and discussed the experience of solving policy problems without mentioning taboo topics. She talked about being on the climate change adaptation team, where no one ever mentions development. She talked about the fact that everyone automatically takes a growth economy as the baseline, without acknowledging that we are nearing the physical limits of our landscape and ecology. (We should be transitioning to a steady state economy, living off annual yields.) She did not mention meat and diet, another huge taboo. She did not offer a behavioral prescription for addressing California’s population. But she said to be brave and raise the topic. So here goes.

California has 39 million people in it. Our arbitrary planning horizon is 2050. In 2050, California is projected to have 60 million people in it. Growth in California is primarily from births (deaths and immigration are roughly even, pg 3). Obviously we value high individual autonomy in decisions as personal as procreation. But here’s something you might not know. A little under half the births in California are from unintended pregnancies (“women got pregnant sooner than they wanted, had not wanted to get pregnant then or in the future, or weren’t sure what they wanted”). Those are live births, not pregnancies.

Most people who do work on this stuff talk about the effects of unintended children on the parents. Here, I am going to speak to the resource costs of that population increase. I’d like to give you some equivalencies.

California has, roughly, 550,000 live births a year.

Of those, roughly, 46% were unintended. You know where this is going.

Every year, this state adds 253,000 kids whose parents did not want them then.

253,000 people is more than the City of Modesto, added every single year. If they follow usual urban water use patterns (which maybe they wouldn’t as young children, but the delay is likely only 15 years or so), that many people would use 63,000 acrefeet of water a year. That is the size of most medium-sized dams in the state (although not the yield of every dam in the state, because dams have a dead pool).  Every single year. For kids whose parents didn’t want to have them at that point.

If you project out to 2050*, the size gets staggering. By 2050, the difference from not having any unwanted children would be about 9 million people. In 2050, I am sure that water managers would be very grateful if they only have to supply water to 50 million people instead of 60 million people. The difference is the population of the Bay Area plus the San Fernando Valley. It is twenty city of Fresnos. Now you are talking water volumes roughly on the order of Oroville Dam, or California’s share of the Colorado River, or what you could get if agriculture shrinks by a third. Addressing population directly is non-trivial.

When you are talking about climate change and emissions, the story is even starker. Every person consumes water and every person causes greenhouse gas emissions, but greenhouse gas emissions have a cumulative effect that matter over time. Greenhouse gases emitted now hurt us more than greenhouse gases emitted in five years. In the year 2050, delayed emissions means less sea level rise, slightly cooler nights, slightly larger snowpacks. Averted people would reduce emissions, but even postponed people would help.

This stuff gets brought up awkwardly at meetings, then we all retreat. But controlling population has profound implications for California’s resource use and climate. We should face it head on.

Continue reading →

The problem with talking about intentional population control is that everyone points and calls you Hitler. Worse, people use it as a vehicle for their nativist sentiments and say the problem is the unwashed brown hordes swarming the border. For the record, both are bullshit. (If you are inspired to leave some racist comment about immigration, please return to the Public Policy Institute of California report, first paragraph.  Birth rate, not immigration, accounts for population growth in California.)

My hope is to avoid some of that by pointing out the scale of the problem of unintended births. As a first cut, simply getting people’s reproduction in line with their own desires would halve our projected population increase. That should not require state coercion. A state policy and real resources* dedicated to that would be beneficial all around.

You could go even farther, and without saying that anyone shouldn’t have children, create policies that delay desired children. Remember, a year or two of delayed emissions are valuable to us. Flattening the growth curve matters at any discrete point in the future. I was more optimistic about his option until I saw the PPIC report and this CDC report saying that mean maternal age at first birth is already pretty high. But you could target programs at communities in which women have children young. You could use the solution everyone offers for less-developed-countries, and educate the ladies. Forgiving student loans for Latina women who haven’t given birth by age 25 might bring their age at first birth up to the general population’s.

My point is that there are non-coercive options and a role for the state (like making birth control free and ubiquitous). The choice isn’t between doing nothing and firing up the sterilization chambers based on eugenics. There are also large environmental costs from maintaining the taboo on openly discussing population. We should be braver. We should bring it up and keep bringing it up.

Continue reading →

Hey folks,

You should watch this webcast of a cool talk by a neat researcher.  It starts, like, right now.

The Sacramento Bee has gotten more and more panicked about the budget situation, and they started off frantic. Before the election, their recommendation was to vote against every last bond measure. Good ideas may be on the ballot, but the Bee editors kept saying that we have no money. From what I can observe, they are right to be panicked about our budget situation. I talked it over with a friend who follows the legislature closely, and he cannot imagine a realistic solution to our budget problem. The rules put in place by propositions combined with the incentives for the Republican legislators* close out any solutions.

The Bee writes editorial after editorial trying to focus attention on the fact that California can’t put together a budget, blaming institutions, blaming individual actors, pointing out the harm. This week they’re running a series on different powerful lobbies in the budget gridlock; they write a plaintive request in the introduction to the series:

As you read these editorials, we’d urge you to think about your role as a member of an interest group.

That’s right. The budget crisis is so hopelessly snarled at the top that the Sacramento Bee is appealing directly to the diffuse better nature of the broad public to rein in their advocates. That’s how bad it is. The constraints on the budget process are so binding that the next best leverage is for the broad public to read a newspaper editorial and adopt long-term benevolence and shared sacrifice. I’m strongly in favor of that, but the Bee’s own comment section contributes to my doubt on that front.

I do not see a path to resolving the budget crisis within our current system. That leads to the interesting question of which is more likely, a large game re-setting force, like a Constitutional Convention, or living in a failed state. What would it look like, living in a failed state? We’re not that far from finding out. We’ll be insolvent in March, which is not a distant and unknowable future. A few months after that, what do we do? Of course we send home all the lazy and irrelevant stateworkers. After that? Send home all the UC, Cal State and community college students and professors? Release all prisoners? Stop patching levees? Stop fighting fires? This isn’t abstract. Right now those are political suggestions to apply pressure, but when we have no money, there won’t be a choice in the matter for very long.

Personally, I think we should start considering an alliance with Somali pirates. They need failed states to base their operations from, and considering that there will be rich pickings headed up to ports in Washington, I think there may be strategic benefits for both sides in a California-Somali pirate alliance.

*Their districts are so solidly republican that if they vote for a budget that raises taxes, they’ll be challenged in the primary and lose. In addition to their own ideological opposition to raising taxes, there’s the fact that they’ll be ousted if they do. That’s some pretty strong motivation for them.

I was very interested in this post, because I think a lot about intentional retreat.  I think sprawling suburbs should retreat from high gas prices.  I think beach dwellers should retreat from the rising sea.  I think Delta farmers should retreat from likely death by flood.  I think all sorts of retreat is necessary.  I think the important question about retreat is “the easy way or the hard way?”.  The hard way will happen by itself, so it doesn’t really require much of us until the very last minute.  Communist central planner that I am, I’m in favor of the easy way, which means acknowledging the coming problem and intentionally choosing to address shortages.

I’m super curious about what will happen to sprawled out suburbs.  Nearly every day of the week I see a news article about some facet of water use becoming “too expensive”.  Local water delivery is either at the edge of their cheap historic supplies or they are being forced to internalize some environmental cost.  Every story closes with a quote about how this will mean the end of financial viability for the residents.  If aggregated rising costs really do herd people in from large houses on the periphery of cities, what happens to the houses?

I personally think that we should leave the landscape neat and tidy behind us, and salvage what we can from the spectacularly bad decision to put valuable low-entropy resources into house shaped lumps all over the place.   That first article talks about businesses who mine abandoned houses.  I’ve been wanting to take down abandoned houses as a reverse Burning Man project. 

Ever since Chris Clarke pointed out that traveling to a pristine desert and building a city is the most American activity ever, and my other friend said to me that “Burning Man is proof that humans love to work”, I’ve wanted to take a camp of people that would usually go to Burning Man out to some unfinished and languishing development.  I think the Burning Man ethic of self-reliance and work should go into dismantling a house or two, stacking it neatly and leaving.  That would be anti-consumerist America and a radical statement.  I haven’t yet been able to convince my friends that it would be a good way to spend the week before Labor Day.  I can’t think why.

The Governor’s Office of Planning and Research has released preliminary guidelines for analyzing greenhouse gas emissions in CEQA documents.  I’ll read this for you, but don’t know what useful critique I could offer.

A public review draft of the next California Water Plan is out. 

Aquafornia tells me the American Water Works Association has put out a primer on what water utilities should do to prepare for climate change.  I’ll read this for you too.

I liked this post on environmental concrete quite a bit, not least because it reminded me that the best presentation I saw last year came out of the concrete sub-committee of the AB 32 Scoping Plans. I had no expectations for a report on concrete and greenhouse gas emissions, but it was great! Skip slides 1-15, which talk about the Scoping Plan. Go straight to slide 16 and start to learn about cement and climate change! Plenty of pictures of cement mixers, too.

I gather from that presentation that there are two places you can cut your emissions from cement. You can improve your cement factory or you can change the cement mixtures that get used in the world. The second option was more interesting to the water folks in the room. My rough sense of the conversation was that specifications for cement mixtures are something you get from some 1950’s manual and no one has given them much thought since. But, if it is important to make cement with low emissions, it could be done. Even more, you might want to do some thinking about what you need your cement for. You might want a cement mix that hardens overnight, so you can put a first floor on that foundation the next day. But we don’t need that in the water industry. Some of our dams don’t dry for a hundred years*. Quick drying isn’t necessarily a feature we need.

When I talk about adapting to climate change taking thought, this is the sort of thing I mean. Used to be**, you pulled down the ASCE manual on cement, looked up the cement mixture for your strength requirements and ordered it from the factory. Now we should probably figure out what we want specific cement to do and find a mixture that does that while minimizing emissions. With the new exciting cements, perhaps they can also breathe in CO₂ as well. This is a lot more thought and finesse than we apply now. Doable for sure, but it adds work.

I’m so tempted to say that this is great new work in an exciting new field. But I bet it isn’t. I bet people have been working on cement for decades and I just never knew about it. They’d roll their eyes if I announced that cement is such an exciting new field just because I didn’t know about it, and they’d be right. One of my big regrets is that I never took the class on cement while I was in school. I suppose I could still do that. Enlightenment and bliss are open so long as one draws breath and I’m pretty sure concrete class is on the path to enlightenment.

Continue reading →